Christian Selchau-Hansen | Source | CEO & Co-founder at Formation.ai

“The future looks to be far more privacy-centric,” says Christian Selchau-Hansen, chief executive of online marketing firm Formation Inc., which works with businesses on customer loyalty programs. “We’re in the beginning of this. The future looks to be one where people and consumers have much more control over their data. The practices around third-party data, collected sometimes without consent, those things are going to go away or will dramatically change.” - Bloomberg

So first-party data means when a customer engages with one of your channels, products, or services, you can get data directly from that customer. It becomes essentially a known customer. And so that is data that you're directly getting from their engagement. Now, the important part of particularly entering what's changed is with IDFA going away, with the third-party cookies going away and being deprecated, a lot of the tools that marketers have used to engage people they believe would be interested in their products, particularly for acquisition or for reacquisition, that data is becoming substantially less powerful.

If marketers have the tools that allow them to act much more quickly, which comes through automation, and at a much more granular level of scale, then all of a sudden, they're going to feel much more unlocked to engage the customer with things that the customer really cares about. 83% of consumers in the US say that they're very willing to receive offers, and getting in a relevant offer helps them connect an opportunity to make a purchase. When you have marketers feeling restricted in getting that relevant offer out the door, that's where there's a big disconnect.